The home improvement store chain Lowe’s was named #1 among Fast Company’s 2018 Most Innovative Companies, for augmented and virtual reality, as well as #1 for innovation among specialty retailers on Fortune’s 2018 World’s Most Admired Companies. How did a company in a dusty, old-hat industry (hardware stores) suddenly become known as an innovator?

As founder and executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs, the company’s disruptive innovation hub, Kyle Nel was at the forefront of this dramatic business transformation. In this episode, Kyle joins us to share his story and discuss how the next level of storytelling — using unconventional tools like science fiction, graphic novels, applied neuroscience, and archetypes — can help you overcome human behavior barriers as you reinvent your company’s future. He shares tips to help you lead both small and large transformations in areas such as innovation, human resources, marketing, process improvement, business strategy, and more.

Increasingly, large organizations are finding their competitive landscape changing so quickly that they’re unable to respond fast enough to survive and thrive. Most mature organizations have a built-in tendency to kill off anything agile, innovative, and entrepreneurial — which often is exactly what’s needed to stay ahead of today’s ever-increasing pace of change in the market.[click to continue…]

Does the way you lead communicate to your team that failure is not an option? If so, you are limiting innovation and development, encouraging cover-ups and lies, and breeding more-serious mistakes. This is true whether you lead a family, a small organization, or a huge business. “The best way to minimize failure is to embrace […]

You and everyone on your team has an “inner innovator,” creative potential inside that can be unleashed and harnessed. With the right tools and a little practice, you and your team can improve your creative thinking skills. What’s more, you can build an embedded capability for innovation that engages everyone at your organization and leads […]

Intuition is the new buzz-word in business, and everyone from Branson to Buffet is touting its ability to guide and direct them to greater success and higher profits. However, the understanding of what intuition really is and how it can serve us in business and in life is deeply flawed. But according to a new […]

Are you a leader who builds teams that innovate again and again? Creating and sustaining an organization that is consistently innovative is extremely difficult (and rare). Conventional leaders see their role as conjuring up a vision and inspiring others to make it happen. The best leaders of innovation see their role quite differently. Former Pixar […]

Conventional wisdom says creativity is the realm of advertising, and innovation the job of product development. We wouldn’t expect to find the IT or Finance departments bursting with innovation. But Google could never have grown from a startup in 1998 to the market dominator, with over one million servers, without an IT team that was […]